Organization

Trainer

Date: 27-29 October, 2014Location: Burlington, MA, United States of America

Regular Price: $1795

This course fulfills the Scrum elective requirement on the Certified Scrum Developer track.

This course fulfills the Introductory Scrum requirement on the Certified Scrum Developer track. It is not a CSM course.

As a certified IC Agile Professional designation course, this Agile training course offers hands-on practices in Iteration Planning, Product Roadmap and Backlog, Estimating Practices, User Story Development and Iteration Execution.

In this Agile Training course, you will learn how to:

Practice and maintain a regular cadence when delivering working software each iteration

Follow the team approach; start as a team, finish as a team

Gain knowledge and understanding of Agile principles with context on why they are so important for each team

Embrace planning from Vision down to Daily level, recognizing the value of continuous planning over following a plan

Build a backlog of prioritized stories that provides emergent requirements for analysis that also fosters customer engagement and understanding

Engage in more effective estimating (story points) and become more accurate by being less precise

Pull together Agile release plans that connect you back to business expectations – including hard date commitments and fixed price models

Apply Agile testing strategies based on unit and acceptance testing, which creates a bottom up confirmation that your software works

Avoid the top mistakes made when rolling out Agile practices and how to craft an adoption strategy that will work in your organizational culture

Explore Software Agility from a Variety of Perspectives

There's more to Agile development than simply a different style of programming. That's often the easy part. However, it totally changes your methods for:

Requirements Gathering

Project Estimation & Planning

Team Leadership

Producing High Quality Software

Working with your Stakeholders & Customers

Focus on Team Development

While not a silver bullet, Agile Methodologies are quickly becoming the most practical way to create outstanding software. We'll explore the leading Agile methodologies. You'll learn the basic premises and techniques behind Agility — so that you can apply them to your projects.

Discover the Strengths Across the Various Methodologies
Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Feature Driven Development and other methods each have their strengths. While there are significant similarities that have brought them together under the Agile umbrella, each method brings unique strengths that can be utilized for your team success. Rarely do organizations adopt one methodology in it's pure form. Rather success is achieved by combining the best practices, creating a hybrid approach.

Not Just Methods and Approaches — You Get Real Hands-On Experience
The only way to Agile success is practice. Agile is an art more than a science. The art of Agile must be practiced and finely tuned over multiple iterations. In this three-day Agile Boot Camp you will put the knowledge, skills, tools and techniques taught to work. The classroom will be broken up into Agile teams and your expert instructor will drive each team through the Agile process from vision down to daily planning and execution. Your instructor will answer questions with real-world experience, as all of our instructors have Agile experience "in the trenches." You will leave the class with practical knowledge and a clear roadmap for your team's success.

Become a Certified ICAgile ProfessionalThe International Consortium for Agile has worked with experts around the world to develop an education roadmap of training and certification for all specialties involved in Agile development. This course has been approved and earns all students the Certified ICAgile Professional designation upon completion of the course.

In-Class Workshops and Group Exercises
Your classroom is set up in pods/teams. Each team looks like a real-world development unit in Agile with Project Manager/Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Tester and Development. The teams will work through the Agile process including Iteration planning, Product road mapping and backlogging, estimating, user story development iteration execution, and retrospectives by working off of real work scenarios. Specifically, you will:

Team Exercise: Teams will engage in a fun exercise that will reinforce the importance of, and power behind, self organizing teams. As with sports teams, individual roles are important, but even more important is the need to work toward a common goal together. At times that means blurring the lines of traditional roles. Great teams will not define themselves by their individual roles.

Team Exercise: Writing a vision statement. This can be very relevant if teams have not been operating with this level planning. If teams are already operating with a clear vision, it is an opportunity to revisit. Each team is expected to have an actual vision statement for their product that would be a solid foundation to build upon. The Product Vision is then posted in a very visible place for the team to reference throughout the remainder of the exercises.

Team Exercise: Each team is tasked with identifying key customer roles, giving them a name, and describing key attributes about the customer. These customer personas are presented to other teams and good idea sharing takes place.

Creating a Product Backlog
• User Stories
• Acceptance Tests
• What makes a good story (sizing and substance)
• Story Writing Workshop

Team Exercise: Each team will conduct a brainstorming session for creating a product backlog in the form of user stories. Each team will present some of their user stories and the instructor will lead discussion about where teams hit the mark and areas for improvement (Instructor will not have all of the ideas, this is a great opportunity for team dynamic). After some feedback and sharing, each team will take a second pass at creating some user stories.

Team Exercise: Each team will group their user stories into common product themes and present them to the larger group. This helps teams to recognize that at times it makes sense to prioritize beyond just individual user stories. Teams then utilize the product themes to establish a desired product roadmap. Like the vision statement, the roadmap is then posted for the team to reference throughout the remainder of the course.

Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with assigning story point estimates to enough user stories to extend at least a few iterations into the future. The method for determining the story point estimates will be Planning Poker. Teams will be given enough time to begin to see some consistency in their team and triangulate relative sizing of their stories. Teams are then asked to estimate their team's velocity.

Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with building a release plan by incorporating priority, story point estimates, team velocity and customer/product owner input to assign stories to iterations with desired release points.

Story Review
• Getting to the details
• Methods
• Keeping cadence

Team Exercise: At the appropriate time, teams need to get to the precise details of what is expected. This can be done in a number of ways, including screen mockups, data design, process flows, use cases, etc. Teams will have an opportunity to get to the details of the user stories that are planned for the upcoming iteration planning. This practice helps teams maintain a regular cadence when delivering working software each iteration.

Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with discussing the details of the stories that, based on the estimated team velocity, may be completed in the first iteration. As the details are discussed, the tasks will be identified that would be needed to achieve the desired result. Teams will discover that at times user stories need to be split into multiple stories and re-estimated. Next, with all of the tasks identified, teams assign actual time estimates to the tasks identified. Finally, the team will revisit the sizing of the iteration to determine if they have the appropriate time and resources to meet their commitment. Led by the instructor, the larger group discusses the pitfalls of committing more than can be delivered and the importance of making and meeting commitments for both the team and the customer. One of the keys to success in Agile is a regular cadence of commitment and delivery for both customer and developer teams.

Team Exercise: Taskboards are an invaluable communication tool during each iteration. Each team is tasked with coming up with their task board that communicates clearly their commitments for the iteration and progress against those commitments. This usually proves to be a very creative and engaging exercise. Teams present their taskboards to the larger group, generating further good idea sharing among the larger team. At their task boards, each team then can hold a daily standup, with one person on the team responsible for ensuring the integrity of the meeting and other team members playing out assigned behavioral roles. With the larger group we will discuss the critical role of an effective daily scrum. Finally, the entire group can share perspectives on the definition of done and the importance of determining that as a team. The instructor will share his or her perspective from experience on an iterative approach to the definition of "done." Team approach is reinforced...start as a team, finish as a team.

Course discussion: Instructor will lead a discussion on the effectiveness of the measurements appropriate for Your company. We need to have further discussion regarding what measurement and communication tools are needed/expected at your company.

Retrospectives
• What we did well
• What did not go so well
• What will we improve

Team Exercise: Teams will hold a retrospective on their experience during the course, specifically on what they learned during the exercises with their team. Each team is then tasked with identifying what things they plan to incorporate into their next iteration.

Team Exercise: Teams will establish a roadmap for adopting the most useful principles and practices learned during the course. The larger group will discuss how this Team Roadmap will be maintained as part of ongoing retrospectives. The instructor will share insights into how teams have successfully adopted Agile principles and practices as well as what pitfalls to avoid. Most teams find this to be the most useful exercise of the course as they apply what they have learned to their situation.

Because this is an immersion course and the intent is to engage in the practices every Agile team will employ, this course is recommended for all team members responsible for delivering outstanding software. That includes, but is not limited to, the following roles:

Business Analyst

Technical Analyst

Project Manager

Software Engineer/Programmer

Development Manager

Product Manager

Product Analyst

Tester

QA Engineer

Documentation Specialist

The Agile Boot Camp is a perfect place for cross functional "teams" to become familiar with Agile methodologies and learn the basics together. It's also a wonderful springboard for team building & learning. Bring your project detail to work on in class.